It’s getting harder to tell if the effort to merge Alberta’s conservative parties is a soap opera, a crime drama, or a bad sitcom.

Or, more probably, it’s just another example of how Alberta conservatives will tear each other apart because they think people will elect them as a united party, even though it’s obvious they’re more divided than ever.

This time the conspiracy theorists are running wild over news that a Wildrose Party office in Edmonton was burglarized and laptop computers stolen.

Kenney’s camp is alleged by Wildrose, indirectly, to be the instigator in its insatiable hunt for data to sign up supporters.

Kenney calls that “a paranoid fantasy . . . all it gives us is a hearty laugh, a belly laugh . . . it should be beyond any person in politics to engage in paranoid conspiracy theories.”

He flatly denies that his campaign or anyone in it was involved.

Kenney also suggests he doesn’t need to steal anybody’s list, even if he wanted to, because “when I entered this I already had a database of 60,000 people who have contacted me over 20 years as a Member of Parliament.”

Tyler Marr/Postmedia/File

Undeterred, the anti-merger elements in Wildrose appear to be using the break-in to pin Kenney, while not quite saying it, with a post-modern Watergate.

The thieves left behind cheques and even a case of liquor, I’m told. That might suggest they were there for precious party data.

On the other hand, bypassing booze isn’t the mark of any political operator I’ve ever met.

The burglary happened Nov. 7 but it wasn’t revealed publicly. The next day, police apparently asked the party to keep its collective mouth shut. Maybe they were waiting for the guys to come back for the liquor.

On Sunday evening, 20 days after the break-in, Wildrose Leader Brian Jean finally sent an e-mail to party members, informing them of the crime.

The Wildrose note artfully suggests that while there’s no sign data was stolen, it might have been.

“Some of you have been receiving unsolicited calls and letters from another political party,” Jean writes. “I do not know how parts of our membership data appear to have been obtained by organizers in another party.

“We do not believe there was any data released during this incident but we cannot be certain . . . we will do more to ensure the integrity of your information going forward. . .”

So, nothing of political value was stolen, but maybe it was . . .

Wildrose MLAs didn’t know the email was coming until it hit their inboxes. Some pro-merger members were angry, but nobody was more furious than Kenney’s people.

Wildrose uses NationBuilder, a U.S. company whose system handles data for many political parties in Canada. It serves 8,000 outfits from Amnesty International to Australian Labour, partly on its reputation for ironclad security. The data is stored in the cloud, not on individual computers.

Just about everybody involved in political grunt work knows this — nobody more than Kenney himself, the chief grunt.

So far there’s no proof of anything beyond idiocy, but this is still damaging.

The emerging line of attack on Kenney centres on painting him as a political thug.

His campaign played into it with the busing caper at the PC policy conference in Red Deer.

Sandra Jansen gave it a boost when she fled to the NDP, charging that the PCs are being taken over by right-wing radicals. And now Wildrose — or the part of it that opposes merger — piles on.

Inevitably, a lot of people are going to believe Kenney’s campaign was up to no good the night of Nov. 7.

And, once again, Alberta conservatives show they save the dirtiest tricks for each other.